Author: Mark

Is Amazon Art a doomed venture? Let’s hope so

~ Mark

One enduring feature of the art world is that a given piece will sell for much more in one context rather than another. The same painting that might sell for 5k from a lower tier dealer won’t command more than 2k on eBay, if that. Yet it could sell for 10k, as a bargain item, relatively speaking, if it ended up in the right NYC gallery (which it probably wouldn’t). Where does Amazon stand in this hierarchy? It doesn’t look promising.

Is Amazon Art a doomed venture? Let’s hope so

Sullivan’s Travels

~ Mark

Sullivan’s Travels. A good light comedy aimed at deflating Hollywood pretension and moral bluster. It took a minute in the first act to catch up with that rapid-fire dialogue. So good. And there’s an insane chase scene with delightfully escalating slapstick. The third act shift to high drama caught me off-guard, but it works. Bonus trivia: this film is the first appearance of the fake novel O Brother, Where Art Thou? This was another edition in an irregular series of road movies, loosely defined. I think Weekend is next.

Two New Books About Jorge Luis Borges : The New Yorker

~ Mark

Borges’s fictional universe is relentlessly, oppressively male. He wrote very few female characters, and there is a vision of masculinity—violent, fearless, austere—that exists in his work as a counterpoint to its obsessive bookishness, and neither ideal has much room for the presence of women, writers or otherwise. His abstraction meant, among other things, a removal from the heat and chaos of human relationships. There is very little love in his work, very little emotional intensity; its richness and complexity is that of philosophical problems, of theology and ontology, not of human relationships.

Two New Books About Jorge Luis Borges : The New Yorker

~ Mark

Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure – for you, but not for me).

George Saunders.

Borges and the Sharknado Problem

~ Mark

Borges:

The composition of vast books is a laborious and impoverishing extravagance. To go on for five hundred pages developing an idea whose perfect oral exposition is possible in a few minutes! A better course of procedure is to pretend that these books already exist, and then to offer a resume, a commentary … More reasonable, more inept, more indolent, I have preferred to write notes upon imaginary books.

Some books better left unwritten! Oh, but here again I will recommend Imaginary Magnitude, which I shortlisted last year:

A collection of introductions to fictional books covering, among other things, x-ray pornograms, computer-generated literature, and a biography of a sentient, moody super-computer. If you like the Borges above [Dreamtigers], or Borges in general, or strange science fiction, or strange conceptual writing in general, this is absolutely a book for you.

Borges and the Sharknado Problem

Emily Nussbaum: How “Sex and the City” Lost its Good Name : The New Yorker

~ Mark

High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of character, “Sex and the City” was a brilliant and, in certain ways, radical show. It also originated the unacknowledged first female anti-hero on television: ladies and gentlemen, Carrie Bradshaw.

Also:

Why is the show so often portrayed as a set of empty, static cartoons, an embarrassment to womankind? It’s a classic misunderstanding, I think, stemming from an unexamined hierarchy: the assumption that anything stylized (or formulaic, or pleasurable, or funny, or feminine, or explicit about sex rather than about violence, or made collaboratively) must be inferior.

Emily Nussbaum: How “Sex and the City” Lost its Good Name : The New Yorker

~ Mark

In Climbing Income Ladder, Location Matters – NYTimes.com.

All else being equal, upward mobility tended to be higher in metropolitan areas where poor families were more dispersed among mixed-income neighborhoods. Income mobility was also higher in areas with more two-parent households, better elementary schools and high schools, and more civic engagement, including membership in religious and community groups.

Hey wait that cuts across party lines what should I believe?! Cf. The Geography of Stuck.

~ Mark

Drift Compatible – Geek Empire. In which L. Rhodes uses Pacific Rim as a pivot to talk about kaiju films as manifestations of urban anxiety, and issues that come out of genre and fandom in general. Good reminder that I can learn from bad movies, too.

When a fanboy defends Pacific Rim to those audience members by saying, “What did you expect?” the underlying issue is genre. An astute viewer will learn to expect certain things from movies that fall into certain genres. A clever filmmaker will learn how to use those expectations to advantage. A fair-minded critic will keep those expectations in mind when judging a genre film. Things are rarely so simple. For one thing, genres carry their own history implicitly, and that often makes it difficult to understand just what’s at stake…

Pacific Rim

~ Mark

Pacific Rim. It’s a pretty mediocre-to-bad movie that I had a lot of fun watching. The dialogue is merely serviceable when it isn’t just blatant crib notes for the audience. It borrows from many good sources (Japanese montster/mecha/anime traditions, Top Gun, Star Wars, Star Trek, Transformers, Aliens, and more…), but doesn’t rise to their level. It trades in some really terrible international typing. The comic-relief duo is cringe-worthy. It also got caught in a weird zone where it was too long, they edited it down so there are strange gaps and emotional undertones that aren’t prepared well. And it’s still too long. And yet… I had fun. Guess I lucked out with good company and a good attitude that afternoon. The fights are good corny spectacles that activated my brain’s primitive comic fanboy region. It’s not good, but you might have a good time.

jomc.links: This mesmerizing image contains all of LeBron James’ scores in Game 7…

~ Mark

jomc:

image

This mesmerizing image contains all of LeBron James’ scores in Game 7 of the NBA Finals. It lasts only four seconds, but one could gaze at it for quite some time. It almost seems to contain the entire history of the game, evoking a sense of data, like a visual stats card. It has information inside of it, but we can only understand the data by repetition. By definition, you have to watch The Loop again and again to understand its depth.

Loops are not short films. Loops are more like spreadsheets: data, but with a fourth dimension, time. Without the repetition, you would not see the data.

http://tribecafilm.com/future-of-film/trapped-in-the-loop-edward-snowden-gifs-vine-instagram

jomc.links: This mesmerizing image contains all of LeBron James’ scores in Game 7…